When renowned film director Péter Gárdos wrote the story, he intended it as a film script, but eventually he made it into a novel. “Fever at Dawn,” the love story of two Holocaust survivors―the author’s parents―has ever since sold in more than 20 territories.

The “Holocaust” experience marks a very important strand in the thematic material of Kertész's published works, yet it is far from being his only theme, as will become clear from the English translations of two stories, scheduled to be released by the small American publishing house Melville House.

"I am not a pessimistic guy. If I was pessimistic, I would never even have started to make films. I hope that these films will be watched in twenty, thirty or forty years, and I think this is as optimistic as you can get in today’s world."

"If this was her fate, why rebel? It couldn’t get any better, only worse" – an excerpt from Hanele, a short novel about an ugly, miserable Jewish orphan girl in a pre-World War II shtetl. The book, rich in ethnographic detail and betraying strong empathy for the outcast, was written by the polymath writer and composer György Láng.